Recent trends have shown that there are more and more applications, or apps, created to fulfill users' tasks. Many of these apps are available at online locations, such as retail websites, in order to offer users an effortless app-shopping experience that may be customized for devices and/or scenarios. For example, various platforms (e.g., Apple®, Android®, and Microsoft®) have had exponential growth in their respective app stores and currently offer over 500,000 aggregate apps for their respective mobile devices. One such exemplary web-centric application is the Yelp® app—the counterpart application to the www.yelp.com website—that is customized to be installed on a variety of mobile devices.
In spite of the growing use of applications, popular or relevant applications can be hard to discover. For example, the standard search protocol of conventional search engines typically surfaces websites, cards, and/or answers in response to a search query. This is true for both desktop and mobile devices. A search query specifically directed to seeking an app may return applications as part of results (e.g., “download Yelp® app”), but requiring an explicit search to surface an app may reduce the number of users who will become aware of applications that may be of interest.